Time for a refresh…
My old portfolio site was an an Angular app hosted using Google Firebase. Looking back at it now, using Angular was probably not the best choice. Not that it didn’t work flawlessly (it did), but it felt like putting a Ferrari engine in a Fiat 500.
I’ll keep using Firebase simply due to the infinite value for money you get with the free “Spark” plan and the fact that it appears to be incredibly reliable. Each of the probably ten times I checked up on it since the last deploy in August 2020, it never failed me.
What are we working with?
I’ve found great personal success leveraging Hugo for writing user-facing technical documentation, so it was a no-brainer for me to use here. Hugo makes it super simple to discover and choose from a variety of themes, and I ended up settling on minima. I’ve forked the repo to ensure things are just the way I like them.
Getting started was incredibly simple, in part owing to my own experience using this in a more professional context. I would even go as far as to say anyone with a decent technical experience can bootstrap a project in a matter of hours. Modifying themes, etc takes a bit more time since you need to know where to look, but unsurprisingly a static-site generator has incredibly polished documentation.
What’s next?
Just like that, the vast majority of development work here is done! I’ll continually be tweaking the theme and adding features as demanded by future posts, but all that’s left now is to populate the site with some good content!